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Dispatch from the Culture Wars #001

There is no sex, no money, no joy I want more in this world than I want for Ronda Rousey to o goshi the shit out of Vox Day.

Ronda Rousey is a certified Bad Motherfucker. She distributes armbars like Jehovah’s Witnesses hand out pamphlets. If Helen Reddy was a woman roaring, Rousey is the existential scream you hear right before everything goes black. Not only would I like my daughter to emulate her, I’d like my sons to, as well. She takes no shit, and she wrote a book.

Well, “wrote” a book. And Wal-Mart won’t sell it in their stores. She’s too violent. I’m not the first person, nor the tenth, nor the thousandth to point out how silly it is for a place that sells handguns and ammunition to suddenly go wibbly wobbly over violence, but it’s so glaring that I can’t not point it out on our little tour of the battlefield.

The Culture Wars rage on, and they rage on weird.

Indiana passes a “religious freedom” law so people don’t have to do business with gay people. Normal people quite rightly call bullshit. Some camera crew finds a doughy hayseed with a pizza parlor, she says, yeah, they probably wouldn’t cater a gay wedding, and the Internet freaks the fuck out.

This is how we fight the war: someone says something, the media makes it a Thing, and then we fight a Yelp Review/GoFundMe battle to see who’s right. One side throws cash at the poor maligned restaurateur, the other side posts one star reviews and pictures of turgid dicks, and then somewhere, some soothsayer in a dark room covered in actuarial tables and arcane symbology will weigh the dongs and the dough and decide Who Is The Victim.

That’s the Trophy, by the way.

It usually seems obvious, who’s the victim. A woman makes some videos pointing out some sexist themes in videogames and she gets rape and death threats. Clearly the victim, yes? WRONG! A little Angry Nerd Jiu Jitsu, and suddenly, it’s the poor maligned gamers who are the victims. They just want to shoot stuff and see the occasional boob jiggle and be left alone. Why won’t the mean lady just leave them alone?

GamerGate is, of course, the ISIS of the Culture Wars. They’ve become a bona fide cultural institution. They have forums, and acronyms, and an argot, and a Strong Brand. Pretty good for a ragtag fleet of videogame addicts, engineering majors, and never-been-kisseds.

This weird crew of libertarian STEM He Man Woman Haters are up and comers. Don’t sleep on them, if you’re placing bets. They’ve made common cause with the newest crew: the Sad Puppies. They’re new to the fight, but they’re actually older than the rest of the combatants. They deal in science fiction. They deal in BOOKS. They have been fighting the fight against Political Correctness (do be so kind as to read that with the appropriate sneer) and cleaning their guns and writing about the future with verve even though mostly they don’t even know how to use Twitter and their websites all look like class projects.

They say, of course, that they’re The Victims. They want to win Hugo Awards (literary awards that people apparently think mean something even though Amazon reviews exist) and the way they see it, a cabal of beige communist genderless warlocks has been systematically working the refs and making sure only very literary (and liberal) stories win (apparently they don’t want too much book learnin’ in their books).

They like their science fiction with more lasers and fewer lesbos. So they went Belichick on the voting rules and figured out how to get their guys into the finals. Okay, fine. Someone’s gotta stand up for spaceships and white guys. Han Solo needs love, too.

But one guy thinks the Sad Puppies are too wishy washy, too soft on the progressive scourge, and he started his own splinter cell: the Rabid Puppies — Opus Dei to the Sad Puppies’ Knights of Columbus. His name is Vox Day (oh; I just got that pun), and he got himself and a couple other cavemen with typewriters on the ballot, and he’s just there to make everyone else look good by comparison. He thinks most of our problems come from giving women the right to vote.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Wouldn’t it just be awesome to watch Ronda Rousey break that motherfucker’s arm?

Stay tuned for more dispatches from the culture wars. And relax. I assure you the Tweet Police will get their due in good time, too. I just ran out of space.